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Saturday, 22 March 2014

Hello Totoro!

I actually finished these about 2 weeks ago but have been racking my brains on how best to photograph ever since. Well, no more - I decided there's no good way to photograph this while wearing them so I'm finally going to post something about them.

Drumroll.... here are my Totoro trousers:

One leg (the right one) features the big Totoro, the other one features the two small ones. I just used Google Image Search for templates.

The big one took about 8 hours to complete. Here's a better shot with completely messed up focus:

What I did here was to cut the big outline from jeans, cut the smaller outline from the wrong side, embroider the little Vs, the whiskers and the eye. Then, I attached the smaller outline using fell stitches, and the bigger outline to the jeans also using fell stitches.

Because I wasn't happy with how the Totoro was visible, I then went around the whole thing with embroidery floss - 2 strands cream, one strand blue - using a back stitch. I also put fray stop around the whole thing to make sure it doesn't fray too much.

I took loads of pictures while doing this, and this is what Google Plus kindly put together:

For the small Totoros, I went embroidery only, and didn't keep track of how long it took me - I certainly spent a few hours on a plane just working on this. Here's a close-up:

First I fixed the jeans (this was the main purpose after all), and did mostly back stitch, with French dots for the eyes and one of those filling stitches for the center. I should have filled the small white Totoro with white as well but I got bored. It's not too bad, but bad marks for lack of completion.